1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a gas separator for gas separation, a method for preparing the gas separator, and a method of performing gas separation.
2. Description of the Related Art
It has been determined that there are limits to the compressibility of gas molecules, a fact which is commonly known as the law of incompressibility of matter. Based on this law, it has further been found that gas molecules behave as if they have some minimum diameter, known as their “working diameter”.
If it is desired to separate one species of gas from others, for any one of many reasons (e.g., enhanced combustion, gas recovery, pollution control, etc.), it has been realized for some time that the ideal separation mechanism would pass one gaseous component in a mixture, while rejecting all others in a continuous steady-state manner. Organic membrane materials allow the passage of only certain molecules, but this passage is typically controlled by a solution diffusion mechanism, which is too slow (partition coefficients allow flows of 2-3 l/ft2/day which are insufficient) a process for this approach to be used in many industrial gas separation applications. Other approaches have created “molecular sieves” that capture molecules based on their size or other physical or chemical properties. Such “sieves” are not truly sieves at all in the customary sense of the term, because no molecules pass through them. Rather, the trapped molecules must be “cleaned out” of these devices periodically by changes in temperature or pressure.
Previous methods to circumvent these drawbacks by the use of porous inorganic structures have focused on producing a porous material with holes in the size range of gas molecules. However, these methods have never attempted to create holes of a specific size, and for the specific purpose of separating two or more well-defined gases. Furthermore, there has been nothing in previous approaches that included the steps of first, selecting the hole size desired, and second, creating a porous material containing this hole size.